


This Is California

by purplehedgehogskies



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: In canon universe, Langst, Post Season 1, This is mostly just about Lance, Very subtle background Klance, because he is my son and I love him and I wanted him to feel pain, very angsty wow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 09:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9317153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplehedgehogskies/pseuds/purplehedgehogskies
Summary: Lance finds himself on Earth after being sucked into the wormhole--his body is fine, but the rest of him feels broken.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking about reuniting Lance with his family for a while now and how guilty he would feel to be home when everyone else is who-knows-where. I figured I would get this posted before Season 2 comes out!

This was California.

Blue had struck the ocean when she was hurtled out of space, lights in the cabin flashing red across Lance’s face as he scrambled for the controls. She was panicking, and Lance could feel it when they plunged into the water, bubbles rising up outside his windows, the pressure making his ears pop as they sunk lower.

Finally, he regained control of her, speaking as reassuringly as he could to the giant lioness as he maneuvered her through the depths. Blue was able to map out the area and found a secluded beach, bordered by cliffs. He had left her there, Pidge’s cloaking technology active, though half-installed.

He could only hope it didn’t glitch before he could get back to her.

When he had trekked his way around the cliff face and onto a longer stretch of beach, Lance could smell the saltwater and hear the squawk of seagulls somewhere distant. He looked up to see a blue sky and single sun—never a guarantee in space—and behind him to see where sand blended into tall grasses, which lead up to the shoulder of a road.

This was Earth. Lance trekked up the slight incline to stand at the edge of the highway, watching as a car sped past. He just barely caught a glimpse of the license plate.

This was California.

Lance removed his helmet and glanced back towards the beach where Blue was hiding.

“I guess it makes sense that you landed here, old girl,” he said softly, rubbing the back of his sore neck. “Planet’s mostly water.”

The nearest gas station was mere miles away, and Lance was in good shape for the most part. He was sore and exhausted, but the paladin training and various missions had done his body good, fitting him with enough strength and endurance to carry him where he needed to go. It was not his body that was the trouble as Lance trudged alongside the California highway, but the images that ate away at him. His recent memory was all swirling purple madness, the screams of his friends as they disappeared into the fabric of the wormhole, as they were wrenched away from him.

The payphone was a relic, rusted to the side of the building between men’s and women’s bathroom doors. He didn’t know if it would still work. Having gotten a quarter from the man behind the counter to make his call—Lance wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to do it, everything bled together, drowned out by the way his head was pounding, the way he imagined his friend’s faces as they were swept away into nothingness, nowhereness.

The man had also insisted on giving him a bottle of water, but Lance stared at it as if he didn’t know what to do with it. It was cold in his hand, even through the black gloves of his suit, but it didn’t offer him anything. It was a part of a reality that he had not yet accepted, that did not yet feel real.

The coin clattered as he pushed it into the slot, his free hand picking up the receiver and tucking it between his ear and his metal shoulder plate. He dialed slowly, scraping the number from a mass of unused memories that had only grown since he left Earth. Lance didn’t know what day it was, or how long he had been gone, but he knew the number for home.

The line crackled as a woman’s voice carried over it and into Lance’s ear.

“Hello?”

He had worried that he wouldn’t recognize her voice. He had worried that he’d never hear it again.

He did.

Tears sprung to his eyes, his hand wrapping tightly around the phone. The water bottle dropped to his feet, his helmet crashing down beside it as he hunched over, clutching at the corroding metal of the phone’s box.

He was sobbing softly, breathily. The tears tasted of salt on his lips, like the ocean, like sweat, like everything he’d thought he’d lost and everything he’d gained.

“Hello? Who is this?” she demanded. Lance only cried harder, choking on his words. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure you have the right—”

“Mamá,” he rasped into the receiver, “Mamá.”

There was silence and static in Lance’s ear. He thought for a moment that she had hung up, that she had thought him an imposter, that she had forgotten the way his voice sounded and didn’t know him from any other guy crying for his mother.

“ _Dios_.” It was soft, and Lance almost didn’t hear it over the sound of his own shaky breathing.

“No, no. It’s me,” he said, smiling through his tears, wiping at his face. “It’s Lance, Mamá. I’m _here_. I’m _home_.”

His mother was crying, asking him where he’d been, asking him where he was. She called into the house, her voice full of everything it could be full of in this moment. He heard the responses of his father, his brothers and sisters, the unique cacophony of his own family, so breathtaking that for a moment it washed away the noise of his memory.

This was California. This was home.

**** 

Lance slept in the back of the car, his head draped across his mother’s lap. She wouldn’t let go of him.

He wouldn’t let go of her either.

 ****

When they arrived at the house Lance sat in the bathtub for hours, his knees pulled to his chest and his face cushioned between them. Mamá sat on the lid of the toilet, her hand in his hair, across his back, still refusing to leave his side.

Another day, another time, he would have hated it. His mother hadn’t seen him nude since he’d hit puberty and he would be damned if it didn’t stay that way.

But Lance did not want her to be anywhere else when he cried for the friends he hadn’t been able to save. Lance did not want her to leave him alone with the bruises that bloomed on his skin, or the pruning pads of his fingers and toes, or the whirling wormhole that had whisked everything away like the drain sucked away the cold bathwater when it was finally time to vacate the bathroom so everyone else could use it.

She only left his side when he was swaddled in blankets on his old bedroom floor, his siblings all sprawled out beside him.

 ****

He was home for three days. The first, he climbed back into his old bed the moment his brothers and sisters had all risen for the day. He breathed in the mustiness of the pillow that had been untouched since he had left for the Garrison in the fall. It was spring now. Easter was weeks away.

Lance could not stay for Easter. He could not stay very long at all. He knew this, he felt it like pinpricks to the innermost parts of him, his heart, his soul, his very self. He knew he could not stay and he begged to forget it for just a day, to cut away the paladin in him for twenty-four hours so he could sleep. 

It didn’t go away. The only reason Lance slept was the exhaustion that had settled deep inside him.

If not for the nightmares, sleep would have rejuvenated him. But in his dreams he saw Pidge, alone in dark, frigid space with no friends or family to keep her warm. He saw Hunk’s hands reaching out and finding nothing to hold onto, Shiro’s Galra arm in pieces and his face contorted in anguish. Coran, facedown, his body uncharacteristically still. Allura’s white hair darkened with red. Keith, his breath rattling as he whispered Lance’s name, as he asked, _“Why didn’t you save them?”_

 ****

The second day, Lance put on a pair of his jeans and one of his father’s old t-shirts. He sat at the breakfast table and felt like the elephant in the room. There was indescribable joy written on their faces, they were just glad he was home; but they wanted to know where he’d been.

“Can you pass the syrup, Artie?” he asked of his brother, who had taken the seat beside him. He smiled weakly, and Artie picked up the bottle and placed it in front of Lance. “Thanks, little man.”

“I’m taller than you.”

“ _Arturo!_ ” scolded their father. Lance furrowed his brow and lifted his gaze from his plate, where he had begun pouring syrup onto his pancakes.

“What?” Lance turned to look at Artie again. His mother sighed forlornly, and his father grumbled about being careful about what they said. Lance put down the bottle and took his younger brother’s face between his hands. Even just sitting down next to Artie, he could tell that the kid had grown. “You’re fourteen, how are you taller than me?”

“I’m fifteen,” said Artie quietly, casting his eyes down. “My birthday…”

Lance frowned. “Oh. Well, anyway, _how_ _dare you_.”

He tilted his brother’s head down towards him and mussed Artie’s chestnut hair with his fist, a proper older-brotherly gesture. It felt right, but it still made Lance feel sad. He had missed so much, and when he left again he would be missing more. He would be missing _this_.

“Mamá,” Lance said, letting go of Artie. He sniffled and wiped his nose. “May I...may I…” he couldn’t even get out the words to excuse himself from the table before the tears started, dripping down his face and onto the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Artie was whispering, clinging to Lance tightly without leaving his chair. One by one, his family members got up and gathered around them, a mass of people holding onto one another, with Lance sobbing in the middle.

“I’m sorry, too.”

Lance’s mother spent the rest of the day bustling around the house cleaning every surface she could find. She didn’t ask for help, and even when he offered she looked at him with wide eyes and softly declined, removing herself before she started crying.

So instead, Lance watched cartoons with his two youngest siblings, Miguel and Luisa, who were nine and seven respectively. No. Ten and seven—he had missed Miguel’s birthday, too. Morgan and Artie sat in the kitchen, just barely within view, playing cards at the table and stealing glances at where Lance was curled up on the couch, Luisa tucked into his side and Miguel sitting on the other side of him, not cuddly but still close enough to touch.

“I don’t think he’s staying long,” whispered Artie to his eldest sister.

Morgan looked at Lance and could only think of the day he was born, before they’d left Cuba, when their house was tiny but at least they could hear the waves. She remembered the way his fingers had wrapped around hers and held tight, and at three years old she learned what it meant to love someone with everything you have.

She knew that Artie was right. Lance was here now, but he was distant. He was halfway gone again already.

She realized just how right she and Artie were that night when she found Lance packing a bag. Morgan almost left him alone, figuring she would talk to him later. But she realized after a second that she might not have another chance.

“Hey,” she said, standing in the doorway to the room he shared with Artie. Lance looked up from where he was shoving clothes into his beat-up backpack. “You’re leaving again.”

Lances hands wrapped tightly around the pair of jeans he was holding. He nodded slowly, his lip quivering as he looked at her. Morgan took a few long strides into the room and held her arms open to him—Lance leaned into her, huddling against her and sniffling, struggling to keep from crying again.

“I have to,” he said. He drew back and wiped his nose with the pants in his hand. “The universe needs me. My _friends_ need me.”

Morgan nodded. She wasn’t sure what he meant, but that was okay. It was privileged information.

“Will you come back?” she asked, still holding onto his shoulders.

“I’ll try.”

She expected him to have changed—in a way, he had. There was something far more tired about him; he seemed years older even when it had only been months. But he was still the same goofy kid who loved too deeply, who carved himself up inside when something went wrong, who wanted to be stronger for everyone else and ended up breaking under the effort.

“Lance, I love you.”

He smiled and withdrew from her, continuing to pack his bag. “I know.”

 ****

He left the next day.

Lance announced it at the breakfast table, and his mother dropped a plate. It shattered on the floor as she turned and left, locking herself in her bedroom for hours, sobbing loudly.

Around noon, Lance knocked on her door and waited. “Mamá. I need to talk to you.”

She didn’t say anything, but she opened the door.

He spent the next hour explaining everything to her. He sat cross-legged on the end of the bed and told her everything that had happened, from the night they’d snuck out of the Garrison to the battle with Zarkon that had brought him here. Lance left out a detail here and there, but his account was pretty complete—by the end, she understood why he had to go back.

“Don’t tell anyone all of this,” he said, holding her hand tightly in his own. “I can’t really explain why, but I don’t think Earth needs to know. Not yet.”

She nodded. This was why he’d chosen to tell her—she would not beg him to bring the information to authorities, so they could be prepared if Zarkon came. She would not ask him to stay knowing what was at stake. She would not ask him to stay as long as his friends were in danger.

She only asked him to stay for dinner.

 ****

Lance found Blue where he’d left her on the beach. She was still cloaked, but when he began trekking towards her she shimmered back into existence.

“There’s my girl,” he said softly, laying a palm against her metal hull. Lance leaned against her leg, hearing the creak of joints as she lowered her head to the ground for him. “This is hard, Blue.”

Lance wouldn’t expect her to understand, but she did—his mind bloomed with images of former paladins in blue, walking towards her and leaving their families in the distance, standing in the Castle of Lions and gazing up at images of their homes, leaning over the edge of a chasm as a red paladin clung to his hand, slipped, fell.

She understood what it was like to leave home, what it was like to miss everything he’d ever known, what it was like to not be able to save them. It was a stab to Lance’s heart but at the same time it roused him like a battle cry. He would not lose the paladins, he would find them—he would go anywhere to find every one of them.

Before walking up the ramp and into Blue’s head, he paused to look at the sunset, the layered sky of pinks and oranges reflecting rippling surface of the ocean.

This was California, it was home, it was everything he was made of.

He hoped he wasn’t looking his last.

 ****

The planet Keith had landed on was a red, rocky hellscape. The atmosphere was dark and cloudy, an impossible to see through haze that Keith had to sail through safely. He had eventually just closed his eyes and tried to feel his way through it, and once he’d cleared the atmosphere both he and Red could see. He pulled up quickly and landed on the jagged ridges of the mountain that dominated the landscape.

He’d been there for about four days, but the days were long and hot and murky here, and Keith was exhausted. He felt like he’d gone back to the desert. It was dry and the red dust from underfoot crusted underneath his fingernails and between the joints of his armor. Keith had taken to going out in just his clothes and helmet, his jacket tied into a makeshift bag to carry whatever supplies he found in.

It was beginning to really piss him off. It was not that he was here that bothered him, despite that there was red sand everywhere and no water. It was the fact that Red had all her systems up and minimal damage, and should have been able to leave.

But she wouldn’t budge.

Keith had found some edible succulent-type plants jutting out between the rocks a few miles down the mountain. The first time he’d made his way down, he’d cut his hands and knees on the rocks, but he grew used to navigating them and was climbing up with relative ease.

It was when he looked up to see Red on the top of the ridge that he stopped in his tracks. There was another silhouette against the rusty sky, the figure of another robotic lioness beside her.

Keith gaped in silence for a moment before moving—when it really sunk in that someone else was really here, someone had really found him, he was scrambling up the rocks with caution thrown to the wind. He knocked his knees and scraped one of his hands against the sharp edge of a stone, but Keith didn’t care.

As he grew closer, he could see the color of the lion’s metal plating. It was Blue. He could see the lanky figure standing between them, leaning against Red with his helmet under his arm. He was looking out at the landscape in the opposite direction, but it was very clearly Lance.

“Lance!”

Lance whipped around, his helmet tumbling to the ground. He didn’t call for Keith, just launched towards him, his feet sliding on the sloped ground, his long limbs all flailing. Keith continued his perilous trek up, meeting Lance in the middle and stumbling into him, wrapping his arms around armored shoulders.

“You’re here, you’re here,” he said, squeezing despite the bulk of Lance’s suit. Lance was whispering a variation of the same, his voice trembling with tears.

It made sense why Red wouldn’t leave now—Lance was supposed to find him here.

This was a planet that scalded Keith’s skin and made dust stick to his face, but with Lance wrapped around him it felt like he was home again.

“You found me,” said Keith. “You came to find me.”

 “I’ll always come to find you,” Lance drew away, smiling brightly even through the tears that streaked down his face and left trails in the red dust that was caked there. “Are you ready to save the universe, Mullet?”


End file.
